Ram Jam!!!
January 20th – January 25th
The Wrestler – Luckily, we got to the theater early to catch this one. The early Saturday matinee was sold out. That’s something I don’t normally run into. But it was the only screen in the metro showing the film. And besides a babbling baby adding it’s own soundtrack, the cozy little theater was a nice experience. (Note: Simply taking your baby into the little walkway that leads out to the exit is not the same as leaving the theater. We can still hear your friggin’ baby cry. But now with a lovely echo.) Still, The Wrestler was better than I had expected. I’ve loved all off Aronofsky’s output to date, but I was a little tepid going into this one. But I wasn’t disappointed. The script wasn’t stellar. But Marisa Tomei’s performance was nice, and Mickey Rourke’s was absolutely amazing. And certainly the director gets a lot of the credit for corralling Rourke into the performance of his life.
Rachel Getting Married – I absolutely loved this one, and despite a theater experience that was even worse than a whining infant. In a mostly empty screening, two pairs of adults (middle-aged couples, mind you) talked throughout the movie. Not whispered. Talked. If you need to have a movie like this explained to you in the theater, then you have real problems. Somehow, though, I managed to twirl this social frustration into a dimension of the film. Just as some of the characters on screen were annoying and narcissistic, testing the limits of others, so were these fellow film patrons. It sort of made me sympathize with the onscreen frustration in a very real way that wouldn’t have occurred if I were watching the movie in my living room.
I loved that this movie begged you to make judgments of the characters knowing full well that you lacked the necessary information to make such judgments. My feelings toward the characters–Kim, Rachel, and their dad, especially–shifted during the movie and have been going back and forth ever since. One thing I’m certain of is that the wedding environment–with its circus tent of multicultural creativity–was marvelous.
Encounters at the End of the World – Beautiful shots of Antarctica above and below the ice. But also a nice portrait of the people who inhabit the camp. I consider myself a loner, but too long in that kind of desolation and I’d be following the penguin into the mountains.
Revolutionary Road – I really, really liked the story. That may be a nice way of saying that I might prefer the book to the film. And the movie wasn’t bad. Michael Shannon was great. And I always adore Kate Winslet. It’s just that a couple of the conversations between Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) as well as the ending of the film seem like they might work better on the page of a novel than they did on the screen.
While the “hopelessness and emptiness” of Revolutionary Road certainly made it a film after my own heart, I wish there had been more exploration of April’s motivations. She seemed so bizarrely focused on Frank, and on his talents and dreams. Why? Had she so thoroughly given up on her own aspirations? Or was it a byproduct of the times, in which most women were allowed to dream of little more than becoming a wife and mother?
There just seemed to be something lacking. As as result, April’s reaction (minor spoiler alert!!) when she figures out they won’t be moving to Paris seemed extreme to me. Even though I could understand her soul-crushing disappointment once she realizes she’s trapped forever in her suburban life, I felt that was due more to the attitudes and opinions I was bringing to the film, rather than anything in the film itself. It seemed like the movie could’ve done just a little bit more to explore why she was so devastated, and driven to do what she did in the end. (Although I appreciated how every time April expressed an opinion that was inconsistent with societal norms, she was called “crazy.” That was typical of that period – women who resisted the prescribed roles of wife and mother were sometimes institutionalized.)
Maybe the book explores all of this more in depth. Or maybe I should just re-read The Feminine Mystique.
At least April’s reactions showed her to be something more than just a cipher for the unrealized feminist. She deserves plenty of fault for falling in love with a romanticized version of Frank.